Fugitive

where calves moon at dusk for the short spring grass

Photo: © David Whyte

The limestone mountains known as the Burren in north Clare are a place of beauty and inspiration, but like every corner of Ireland they have hidden among their slopes and rocks, a red thread of tragedy running through their history. During Cromwell’s repression of the Irish in the seventeenth century, his henchman Ireton, pursued fugitive catholics unmercifully through these hills. But the poem is also about the larger human sense of being pursued, when we ourselves feel persecuted and hunted by outside circumstances we seem powerless to effect. We are all at present subject to the predatory actions of the mendacious adolescent presently occupying the White House: someone who could give both Cromwell and Ireton a run for their money when comes to the merciless pursuit of inhuman goals. DW

Fugitive

From the shelter
of the stone
walled corner
where calves
moon at dusk
for the short
spring grass,
look out from
your high stone place
at Ireton’s
troop searching
the mauve bog light;
watch them
indifferent to
the ardour
of a new season
breaking
through limestone
and fern cleft,
traversing the
grike and grain
of a white Burren
made black
and shining
by late rain,
and the soft
metamorphosis
of water
falling past them
through
what looks like surface
into the hidden
landscape beneath,
the underground
that keeps you safe,
the souterrain
of drip and drown,
where one can listen
to the horsemen
searching above,
while you call
on Mary and Joseph
and Conor O’Brien
and the honour
of your father
and look down at them,
through the cold run,
of that single
necessary tear,
the slow
travelling revelation
of damp decline
touching cheek and chin
that falls
under the gravity of loss
into some heady, stone
cathedral dark-space
holding everything above.

Why show yourself
to the world
when everything real
has foundations
not seen by light?

When under-neathness
holds everything
in some deep
sacred non-space?

Why try to be
any new origin
when spring seems
to do it all regardless
of the death
of loved ones
or the cry
for mercy?

Why go on,
when newness
still comes
from nowhere,
growing even
through grief
and the indifferent
warming light,
barely willed,
still brings spring
purpled with gentian
and trefoil
and the green cress
bubbling
in water
by the
blesséd well?

Why stir at all
when season
and age
and heartbreak
does it all?

Tempting to assume
the shape made
in staying hidden,
the crookback stance,
the pursed lips
and the limbs
gripping stone
like unforgiving ivy,
tempting to make
a life in shadow now,
a gripping
growing round
that hangs on
only to what
can be remembered,
to give up,
to go where others
went before
into some
other parallel,
that other
invisible light
that catches
only the harshness
of your face,
as you sup
in satisfaction
in the quiet hall
where the
Tuatha
sat before you,
waiting to come
into the world again,
a tempting
internal exile
kept at bay
while you catch
the beckoning
sense
of a rising tide,
and the need to
rise and go,
a gusted, caught
wherewithal suddenly
within you
to join the others,
another wild goose
lifting its head
above the stone lake
sensing a distant shore,
wanting to leave and return
renewed by the wind,
here and gone,
away and beyond
over the sea.

Go now,
before you
understand
this island
and this world
and its future
only through
the small triumph
granted
by squinting
through stone.


-from Pilgrim

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